Anand Nandakumar on the future of remote driving and ride services | E1978

0:00If I was Cruz's CEO at the time, I would have probably been extremely honest, extremely transparent of what happened. upfront, the minute that happened, disclose everything to our DMV regulator right off the bat, sit in their office and say, hey, this happened. I understand this is not the right move for us. This is how we see that going forward. How do we work on this together? Absolutely. Sunlight is the bestest, in fact. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Intercom. Intercom's AI-first service is the best thing to happen to your customers since you. Twist listeners can get 90 % off Intercom's platform at intercom.com slash twist.

0:42Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI. Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models. Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyai.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I've been talking about self-driving cars a whole bunch because hey they're starting to become reality but there are concerns around safety and so today's guest from halo car reached out to me after i talked a little bit about remote interventions specifically around the tragic case in california of crews covering up one of their cars dragging a passenger who had been hit by another car operated by a human and waymo got back to me as well when we talked about it on the all-in podcast a couple of months ago so i invited anand nunda kumar on the program from halo car how are you doing fantastic jason thanks for having me okay explain to us what halo.car does and how it's different than what we've seen from the other autonomous driving startups and of course we'll play one of your videos while you explain all this yeah the first of all we're not an autonomous car company instead we make a hardware kit that can go into pretty much any vehicle that would allow us or a vehicle operator to remotely drive the vehicle end to end okay all right so this is a video game this is grand theft auto i kid uh you can with this you know with real world consequences so here we go for people who are not watching the video go to youtube.com and search for this speaking startups and halo uh car but here's a halo car um it looks like it has some cameras on it it looks like it's a kia and then there's somebody literally driving remotely with a what looks like a video game controller am i correct that's a video game controller very similar yes okay and this is happening halo.car is happening in the real world today it's live it's live on public roads correct okay where are you live right now what's your state yes okay so in las vegas i see what looks like a video game player uh sitting in a very comfortable chair looks like a nice uh video game person's chair um and they have that classic i guess i don't know what the race car games are but you got that driving and that's connected to the steering wheel so this requires requires a human and it requires um a really low latency connection am i correct that those are the two most important factors here and also the cameras so they can actually see around the car so all three for sure now the benefit of self-driving is removing the human from the car so you remove the expense travis famously said at a conference like the major expense here uh after of the car and the insurance is the driver so yes if their driver's not in the car uber would become a lower priced concept here but this doesn't lower the cost does it or do you envision eventually that somebody in manila getting paid one dollar an hour will be driving these cars and would the latency then be acceptable and is that is that eventually where this heads yeah so think about it in a different way here so our mission the reason why i started the company in the first place is to move the world away from traditional car ownership concept into a fully serviced concept where you push a button a car will be delivered to you wherever you are for you to drive yourself so once you get to your destination you don't worry about parking because let's let's be honest parking is always a nightmare so once you get there you simply hop off walk away the car just disappears magically ah so this is like a this is a hertz competitor more than an uber competitor am i correct absolutely right so the way you want to think about rideshare in general so we want to start off with the car rental model first because getting a car at the airport is a clumbersome process we've all been through you know terrible experience where you have to get a shuttle bus and go to a random parking lot wait there for a couple hours and then the guy sells you insurance not the car right so you want to skip all that and assume saying what if a car can be delivered to you inside the airport.

5:28That's the first kind of segment that we want to really improve. Once we do that, that's a low-level market where you went in and get in, get familiarized with customers, getting this service out there. And then that starts going to short-term rentals as a next phase, where you don't need to keep the car for two days or three days in a row, just like a normal car rental. You only keep it for a few hours. So you make multiple stops, right that's the most expensive part about uber when you make multiple stops it just jacks up the price really quickly but if you have a car for a couple hours you make all your stops and drop it off in a hotel and walk away the car's gone and when you want one you push a button shows up again that's a second phase that we think that we want to get into the market and the ultimate is the ride share itself think like uber but you drive yourself so you have the best of both worlds you don't have a driver inside the car right and you have the convenience of car coming to you instead of you walking 20 blocks in crazy heat like here in vegas or in a crazy rain to get to a car and you can't unlock it you have to call a customer service agent and like just dealing with all this kind of crazy overhead of having a car yes and if you were to do this with humans correct um i had a service like this uh that i used when i lived in los angeles where i would drive to the curb and somebody would jump in the car and take my car put it in parking yes and then when i was done they would do the reverse they would come and bring me my car i think it cost me like an extra 50 or 100 to do this and i don't know if that service still exists but it was a pricey service i'll tell you that and we had one here in san francisco called luxe l-u-x-e yeah and i don't know if you remember that one but i would drive and i would normally pay 25 to park in the tenderloin plus i would give the guy five bucks on the way in five bucks on the way out so it's 35 bucks and they started doing it for 30 bucks to have a valet waiting in a valet blue jacket outside my office hand them the key they would park and then i would tell them hey wait downstairs and they would wait for up to i think 20 minutes for you that's right so that was kind of nice but it's really expensive that went out of business because i think it was too pricey yeah so the economics there is very difficult because think about this guy has to be in the location where you're going to drop off the car number one.

7:42So they have to get there somehow and then take over the car from you, go park in a random place and then they have to get a ride back to wherever the other customer is going to drop off. The next customer is going to drop off the car. So just the shuttling the actual driver from one car to another is a very big hassle, right? And the other part is now you need to have physical labor that is present in a very high density city that is extremely expensive to live in already. So instead, what if the driver could be in Vegas but repositioning cars in san francisco ah so okay hold on here now we're talking living in san francisco if you put a job description out for a 75 sorry to somebody who put a job description out for 75 000 recently in san francisco and they said they got like hundreds of replies yeah the majority of which were are you insane 75 000 how would anybody live in san francisco on 75 000 now this was for like an administrative position that athenawow.com could have done for you for $36 ,000 a year remotely, but they're in Manila and the cost of living in Manila is quite different.

8:45So a driver in San Francisco needs to make, gosh, I don't know, like 90K, 90K. Okay. In order to just have like a basic sustenance as a living. Whereas a driver in, I would guess Las Vegas could live off of half that two thirds. Oh, easily. But 55, 60K, that's like a good capital to live in here because the cost of living is so much lower. You don't have state tax and it's such a good place to live. It's a smaller city compared to like a high density city like San Francisco. That's why we believe that remote driving option could be leveraging American jobs that are here in America so we can actually very efficiently reposition vehicles.

9:28That's one of the reasons, right, where you want to move labor into a very affordable environment. The second point where I think that we're going to be leveraging is a single remote pilot can now multiplex into a fleet of vehicles. Oh, say more. Okay. So, like, for instance, now you're driving a single car. So, they literally push a button, connect to a vehicle, and move that to a customer, and end that job. The minute they end the job, another job is queued in the background. It's a totally different car. It could be in a totally different city. Ah. So, now they're think about this in an eight-hour shift.

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11:25So go to intercom.com slash twist to apply. or if you prefer you can just do an email at startups at intercom.io all right so this makes a lot of sense if you drop off the car you pick it up at the vegas airport now all of a sudden my screen goes bing and now i'm in a new car in a in a parking lot somewhere and i'm driving it to a residential home a studio apartment in vegas 900 a month a one bedroom 1100 a month two bedroom you get the idea a studio in san francisco probably 2500 a one bedroom probably 3500 two bedroom probably 5000 so the cost of living is probably roughly a third in vegas and so you specifically mentioned hey this is for american jobs well america's got the lowest unemployment of our lifetime are you able to find drivers and then what do you think you'll wind up paying the drivers and would you allow them to do this from home or do they have to come to a facility it It looks like they're in a facility right now, obviously, because you're in beta.

12:26But eventually, could somebody be doing this from home? Absolutely. That's the whole vision for us in the future. For start off, there are plenty of folks that are unhappy with their current jobs, that are getting paid very low wages, not very happy because they don't have a future or career path to go accelerate themselves. What we're doing is very different. Think of like an Uber driver that is stuck in a car, dealing with crazy customers all day long and putting wear and tear in their cars, putting miles in their cars. Instead, if they just sit in a seat office, nine to five job, full pay, healthcare, you have all this advantage.

13:05Now you can actually just move cars around without dealing with crazy customers. Amazing. So you see this as a$20,$30 an hour job working from home or something? Exactly. Exactly. Like that. Yes. something like that something like that exactly so we're next phase where we're going is full vr so we just want to ship them a kit so you can sit home and drive a car the inspiration actually came from my mom way back in india we don't come from a rich family we come from a very very poor family and my mom used to do medical transcription way back in the day i remember that was like a very big deal we would ship paper or faxes digitized paper all the way to india for legal and for healthcare and they would do data entry right that was like a major major in the 80s and 90s business in india yes yeah exactly and it was very efficient where what happened instead of shipping paper they would just ship an audio file and my mom would have a a small little foot pedal where that would do a rewind play pause and forward of the audio clip so she can sit and hype the whole day and she was making decent living wage off of that and why can't we do that for remote pilot where we can ship a kid they sit home and reposition cars especially with sit-home moms that are fantastic drivers right let them make an extra penny here and their extra buck here and they're sitting home while taking care of kids and family now what about combining this with self-driving so if they're self-driving in the car having a safety driver seems to be wise so have these other self-driving car companies come to you and said hey you know we're waymo or cruise or whatever i suppose they would want to do it themselves but there's a lot of people making self-driving car technology today so do you ever see a hybrid where you know i'm driving from home i've got my headset on or maybe i've got 10 cars i'm watching a fleet of 10 cars driving around and it has a percentage certainty you know maybe this car in boston it starts snowing and it's like hey this is that 50 certainty of safety and slow down hey everything going on here in arizona california smooth sailing texas no rain perfectly dry they're all at you know 99.59s and then that driver can just jump on and monitor the most acute situations is that where this heads absolutely love that i'll give you a little bit of context here before starting this company i was uh i was leading perception teams for uber at the self-driving unit so we would constantly see problems with our autonomy stack constantly see edge cases with our autonomy that.

15:49So traditionally, just like you mentioned, all these edge cases are handled by a safety driver inside the car, right? And then what would happen is we would offload terabytes, almost petabytes of data from a single day's drive. And then it'd be an army of people that have to go through all the interventions and try to see and understand what really happened and retrain all of our models for that specific edge case. The thesis behind why I started the company is I don't see automation happening overnight. We don't see level four, level five happening overnight. It'll be a gradual progress towards full autonomy at one point.

16:25That's how I see automation happening. But even when automation happens, even when level four is there, we will still need humans in the loop. So that is a world I'm building for today. Tell me about, there have been two instances that you are, I'm sure, acutely aware of. one of them is the cruise uh dragging a pedestrian after it was hit by a human and then obviously there was the tragedy where an uber safety driver was playing candy crush i believe as dark as that is and um i don't know if you were there during that uh terrible time but uh the safety driver literally um didn't do her job so take me through those two instances and what the industry has learned from them and has that set the industry back and if so how much so i was there and uber times it was one of the darkest days for us over there we learned a lot from it right it's a it's a very deep situation that happened for the industry that was a wake wake up call for all of us what we really understood at that moment was there are enormous amount of edge cases that a single sensor would not just solve for people came out and saying oh if you add a lidar it will to solve it.

17:38But that's what's not the case. When we have so many sensors in there, it is all about how do you identify that current object and then push it down to the entire stack. I'm going to go a little bit of a ramble for a second. So I want to talk about two different forms of autonomy that's happening. There's the first phase of autonomy, which is there are four modules to it. A perception, prediction, motion planning, and vehicle controls. That's a traditional model. That's how Waymo operates. That's how we built it at Uber. And there's a new wave, especially the Tesla's 12.0 release, which is end-to-end deep learning, end-to-end machine learning models.

18:17That's where the future will have to go towards. Because in the first phase of version 1.0, anytime we see an edge case, you have to take over by human, collect all the data, and an army of people have to intervene and understand what really happened. What was the type. Where did it fail? Did the perception fail? Did the prediction fail? Did motion planning fail? And then retain those nodes to actually understand that edge case. But this is a complex process. It's extremely heuristical, right? That's why it was so difficult for us to solve for edge cases. What's happening now is very, very interesting where you're pushing all of the learning to the edge.

18:55That is, let the car by itself understand what the edge case is. Let's not have a human teach what the edge case is, but let's try to supervise that with data that we can give, context that we can give. So let the models understand that by itself and get over it. That's the right way to do it for self-driving in general, right? But if we remove the driver from the car, it gives us the ability to scale that up lot faster with a remote human that is able to supervise and push the autonomous down. Got it. Where are we at with autonomy if we were to look at say the you know for every million rides that occur in a city here in the united states uh right now obviously for every million miles it must be a fraction or be being done autonomously like way less than one percent correct that's fair between waymo that's right when does it get to in your mind 10 of rides 10 of uber and lift rides ride sharing rides move over to autonomy me uh yours elons waymos cruises whoever when would we hit 10 this is a very hard question to answer right that's why i asked it yeah you're not gonna ask easy questions so i would say in this game elon's probably the furthest along primarily tesla's probably the furthest along in my my humble opinion that's primarily because they have the ability to collect fastest possible data than anybody else.

20:25They have the millions of cars that are already driving in all over the world, collecting all these edge cases, number one. Number two is they have the unique ability to run machine learning models or end-to-end models in shadow mode. So even when you're driving a car, the car is technically in simulation mode in the back end, underneath itself. That's a huge power advantage. If you think about the way most of the world, I have two different difficulties with that model. One is your ability to scale because you need to be in every single city, every single area for you to hit the 10 % Uber ride share market.

21:01That's a very difficult problem to solve capital-wise. Even though Uber, Lyft has, sorry, Waymo has unlimited check size, right? But each of these cars are$300 ,000. $300 ,000 still. Wow. That's right. Yeah. But they're doing something like 50 ,000 rides a week. is what I heard. Yeah, but 50 ,000 rides at like$6,$7. Think about how much is that going to bring back, right? Plus, these are not assets. These are depreciating value. Cars, the more miles you put, the low return it has in it. Okay, the internet has never been busier. Everybody's creating new websites, new products, new services, and search is changing.

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22:52So you think Waymo has a, and I heard Bill Gurley talk about this on his podcast. They have a unit economics problem. $300 ,000 for one of those cars. Even if it's$150 ,000, you can only do so many rides in it per day. and if they're charging seven bucks a ride man to that car has got to cost five thousand a month to maintain and whatever and supervise so yeah i don't know when they hit break even but it's got to be a hundred rides or so uh no it's got to be a thousand rides thousands yes yeah maybe a thousand a month which would be you know 30 a day right for several years to just get above that mark now just to break even right just to break even that's not doesn't include your hd mapping that's a whole can of worms that explain that can of worms what does that mean yeah so hd mapping is high definition map which is they have to have a fleet of high definition sensors collecting massive amount of data to localize each object that you see in a in a road like lane lines stop signs lights which direction is this light facing what is that light is a left arrow light is a straight light it's a green light there's a red light there's a lot of cost in maintaining that massive amount of hundreds of millions of dollars probably a year each city they have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to map the heck out of it really wow that's what the number two is when cities change because cities constantly change when you change a route or change it can put a construction zone in it's a whole bunch of problems startup you have to remap everything redo everything in real time and have humans that are involved in the back end to annotate every single scenario, every single change.

24:34And this is where Elon has an advantage because they've got a million cars out there. They put the sensors in every car, whether you buy FSD, full self-driving or not, the sensors are in there so they could be in shadow mode. Who knows what percentage are actually recording every trip and doing this because I would think they have too much data now. Yes, I do. How many times do you need to have me drive up and down the 280 or 101 here in the Bay Area to understand how those things work because they don't change all that often. And there are other things that do change. I know Elon had a quote about remote.

25:05Let's play that quote and then get your feedback on the other side. When you take the driver out of the seat for the driverless car, how do you plan to handle interventions? There are interventions that happen where the car is simply like, I don't know, gets stuck down a one way street with a crazy construction situation, in which case it'll basically phone home and say, help, I'm stuck. we can probably solve a lot of these things just by you know remoting into the car and kind of like steering it like a giant rc car so this is what we bet right so we've kind of put a very proprietary hardware into a tesla that allows us to remotely take over the vehicle shift it in gear drive it you literally see this video right now there's nobody inside the car got it so here you go you're driving on a course with a bunch of cones you've got you know five different views i don't know if those are the tesla cameras are yours i'm assuming that the teslas oh they're yours so you bolted on more cameras yeah but everybody knows that tesla's got a bunch of cameras around it um and so yeah you could be the outsourced takeover group for you'll be the aws for anybody who needs this as a service remote driving as a service boom and this where this really makes sense i think is trucking yes so have you considered trucking as an option because one of the issues with trucks is they have to stop so the driver can sleep and that sucks drivers are pulling over to starbucks or wherever truck stops sleeping for eight hours waking up it's just an arduous life and they don't get to see their families for weeks at a time i can see your technology working incredibly because i could hand off i could do eight hours 8 p.m comes around i've been driving now you take over maybe you're in another city where it's daytime and you'll be nice and fresh and boom you you work on your uh time frame 100 so there are a couple things here i want to talk about one especially when it comes to logistics there are vans and there are big rigs the articulated trucks both need some form of human um intervention when you think about automation so so big rigs for sure automation is the way to succeed here right the long trips on the freeway going from 15 from california to texas those are really good routes that could be fully automated but the difficulty for big rigs when it comes to automation is how do you get it into the ramp and how do you get it off of the ramp?

27:36Got it. So autonomy will come to those trucks. They're going to rock it going across the 10 freeway across the United States, whatever. 100%. But when they have to get to the local Walmart and unpack, that's where you would take over. Exactly. So show us, I know you had another video that you wanted to show of your operation. Maybe we could show that video and you can just give us any more specifics that we missed. Yeah, sure. So I'm going to take my phone and walk us through the facility. Oh, here we go. Amazing. And I don't know who's driving, what they're doing, what jobs they're doing. So we're just going to go right in the drive controls.

28:10I love it. Here we go. Take a look at it. So here we go. It's a first for This Week in Startups, a live view of the drivers. He's walking over out of his private office. And let's see what's going on in the pit. Here's the pit, a bunch of drivers. All of our engineers are here. So I'm going to walk you through our drive controls. Ah, drive controls. Nicely done. All right. So we tend to keep it very quiet here because they're focused on driving. So we have multiple pilots at the moment driving. We see this gentleman right here. He's driving a car live on public roads, all in Las Vegas. Amazing.

28:49All controls. He has full visibility around the car. In fact, the way we engineered our sensors is they can see better than yourself sitting inside the car. If you think about a car, it's not made for high visibility. It's made to protect you to sit inside the car in the case of an event happens. So you have these A-pillars that are preventing you from seeing the edge of where the car lands on the road. So here, we don't have to worry about that. We have to give them best possible visibility so they can sit here, literally drive a car. Yep. Far away. Amazing. and so they've got their main camera is the dash they're seeing right across like you would if you were sitting in the car but they also have five looks like at least five other views and there's six cameras here it looks like so they can see the side behind the left the basically all four quarter panels it seems and behind them so they theoretically should be able to see somebody who's coming up behind them on a fast motorcycle or somebody tries to cut them off or you know etc in a way that a human in a regular car would not see that's exactly right so they can actually intervene take over drive wherever they want to drive and park a car they can actually do a lot better parking job than ourselves sitting in the car because they have so much visibility around the vehicle and you know what i would tell you it's interesting if i could put this in my car right now today i would pay you like 20 bucks an hour and i would buy i don't know 20 hour a month subscription 400 bucks a month and would love to just have the ability when i'm driving to say you know what i gotta check my email here i'm gonna be on the road for 40 minutes i'm more than willing to pay a dollar a minute for somebody else to drive and i would literally do that you know it's kind of like if you have more time than money or whatever and you you want to set up a driver or take an uber but here i want my car and what an amazing opportunity that would be so are you thinking of going direct to consumer with this yeah jason i'm going to take it one step further imagine two row 2.0s a car could be delivered to you a pierce car you go buy a kia from from a local dealer that comes with a halo trim in it so you as a customer you own the car when you want to and when you don't want to, you push a button, put it in the marketplace, it just goes out, earn money.

31:11So same as Elon has outlined in his auto thing is, hey, we can all, like Airbnb, like Uber, make a little money with these assets when they're not being used. Absolutely fantastic. 100%. And so tell me about regulation. You're in Las Vegas. They are very pro-tech there. Is there another market you're going to go to next? Have people from, say, MENA or China or Australia? you there are some other places where you know geographies jurisdictions where people are pretty pro this technology what's sitting next do you think yeah so nevada was the first one for us they're very friendly for autonomous vehicles and futuristic for tech so we came here i actually started the company in san francisco first and moved here a few years ago worked with the dmv very closely drafted the first legislation for them and got it passed so that was a phenomenal win for us, right?

32:00Now we have other states that want to do the same thing. We talked to Florida, we have Texas, we have Arizona, we have Michigan, and now California is extremely open for this. And we can go deploy in all these states, working with our regulators up front. That's what they want. They want companies to come to us, come to them, and draft what the future is going to look like. And we can actually have a path for drafting the legislation right now. Outside America, we We totally see countries like Japan coming up right now for us. Think about it. Tokyo is a very density. You can't have cars. You can't own cars there.

32:35It's very difficult to own cars. Right? So you want to have a car share service that is extremely popular, that is very low cost to run. The OPEX has to be very low. So you push a button, it just gets delivered, and you don't have to ever worry about parking it. Amazing. And this is where, you know, if we have less cars in parking lots, you can then reclaim that space. So if you think about the average American home or an apartment building, we have a minimum number of spots you have to have. So just think about your homeowner and you have like a two-car garage. If I didn't have cars, that two-car garage could be turned into literally two more bedrooms in my house.

33:16It would be literally put a Jack and Jill bathroom in there and I have two more bedrooms. You could turn every three-bedroom house into a five-bedroom house just by taking over the garage. So this could have massive ramifications on the second-order effect on things like housing. You know, you got some giant... I remember when I was in a corporate housing when I first moved to Los Angeles, Santa Monica, there was an equally large building for cars, a garage that was five stories. You could convert that into another 50 apartments easily. And so this is the future, folks. Absolutely amazing. Great job.

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34:27Well, you can join over 200 ,000 developers who are now building with assembly AI. When you hit 200 ,000 developers building like assembly AI has, that means you're the gold standard. So here's an example. Vitaio makes video editing tools that my team use every week here on this week in startups and you'll see captions over our clips well we wouldn't be able to do that without assembly ai crunching all that audio data in the background and that's what vita io does they use assembly ai and that provides the world's lowest error rate and up to 30 percent fewer hallucinations so here's your call to action build powerful ai experiences for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models head to assemblyai.com slash twist and get 100 hours free hey that's great go play with it you're a developer you want to play with this check out assemblyai.com slash twist today i didn't ask you about the cruise accident what's your take on um what they did with regulators they seem to uh according to all reports have lied or yeah not been fully honest and it seems like the cleaned house over there is cruise toast have they burned the bridges with regulators what's the back channel in the industry about what's going on at cruise what do people say about cruise when they're you know in your industry on the back channel and nobody's listening yeah that's a that's a sad one for us in the industry absolutely um there's a fine line between building a software company and a very safety critical company where in software side you can push the boundaries beyond regulations and you know growth at all costs and launch at all costs kind of mindset works really well so you can iterate it really fast right based on any kind of change that happens but when it comes to driverless cars you have a 4 000 pound vehicle that's on public roads we have to be up front with regulators in fact most of the times even regulators don't understand how to regulate this industry they're not like heavy researched folks that are coming from this industry they want to work with private sector.

36:32So that involves trust. Correct. Exactly. So this is how I would frame it. If I was Cruz's CEO at the time, I would have probably been extremely honest, extremely transparent of what happened up front. The minute that happened, disclose everything to our DMV regulator right off the bat, sit in their office and say, hey, this happened. I understand this is not the right move for us. This is how we see that going forward. How do we work on this together? them absolutely sunlight is the best disinfectant they basically for people who don't know they submitted according to reports the first part of the cruise car hitting the pedestrian which was hit by another car it was kind of like a ricochet type thing human hits human car hits human pedestrian that pedestrian then gets knocked in front of a waymo no fault of the waymos that apparently stopped as quick as it could but still hit it but then the car decided to i think through human intervention but perhaps not park itself when it parked itself it dragged a human being 20 or 30 feet according to reports and then when they submitted the video they didn't submit the dragging part essentially they lied or they omitted the key part of the video the key learning and yeah they cleared house over there since then and it is part of i think you alluded to growth at all costs you know dare i say like silicon valley you know move fast and break things this is the ultimate failure of the move fast and break things concept i think this is where i would probably give credit to weber where they have done a very good job working with regulators and being up front and disclosing quite a bit they had a recent poll poll dance incident let me call it that way oh oh yes explain this one because i we have a picture of it too we'll find on the internet i saw this right the the one of the way more cars ran into a pole and it makes perfect sense of why it would have it's probably because that pole was not annotated in the hd map is my guess i honestly i need to know the more data of what had happened but it actually hit the pole and you saw there was a it's a it's a bit of an accident where the car was not totaled but the front was completely behind the pole.

38:43They had to come and recover the car and tow it and whatnot. But they were very honest about it. They were very direct to the DMV. They disclosed what happened. They said, hey, we've identified the problem. We fixed it. The subway fixed it. And it won't happen again. My guess is they're now having a team of folks focusing on annotating every pole in that city. So the car can navigate around it. Yeah. Here's a picture of it for those of you watching. essentially you know when you go down these alleys it's a little confusing because the poles are supposed to be on the sidewalk with a curb there is no curb yes in an alleyway in some cases but there are telephone poles this thing just at low speed hit it looks like you know a minor amount of damage and it was on the way to pick somebody up but there was another one that got in an accident on the road as well but i think it was another car hitting it so almost all crashes so far to date have been to the best of my knowledge extenuating circumstances these things generally don't cost me problems as we wrap up here tell me about um inclement weather there's always videos you know you'll see 50 people coming around the same turn in lake tahoe from the bay area without snow tires on and they're all going to ski and literally people are standing there watching one car after another slide on the black ice and get in accidents will this technology work anytime soon in fog rain ice snow conditions or is that just like 10 years out let me try to distinguish in a three different ways first is the automotive industry itself has actually gotten really good at this where the car can identify a ic track and enable traction or disable traction control based on the condition that it's actually going through.

40:36Cars have gotten pretty smart and identifying this, number one. Number two is autonomy has to listen into what the car is saying and take that into consideration as one of the inputs outside of just the sensors, right? See what the traction is happening in the wheel, understand that, and use that as one of the inputs on how to handle the environment. the third is when it comes to remotely driven vehicles humans are much better at handling weird scenarios like this where we see the dash light going off or the traction control we now know how to handle that let's slow down let's go to the rightmost lane where things are much more easier to handle and then slowly get the car crawl back to the base because you don't want to be operating in a very snow storm you want to shut down operations that's that's the normal thing to do because people are not going to be moving around in a very heavy environment like that right that's kind of how i would bucket it got it makes total sense all right listen continuous success uh if people want to try this yeah uh next time they're in vegas what do they do they go to halo.car and rent a car from you or is it like you have to do hertz and then you wouldn't know actually how do i try this i kind of want to do a shameless plug here please plug away you earned it you gave me the game of the solid 40 minutes like plugs are welcome we are pro tech pro capitalism here so halo car is a uh now we're a b2b company we work with our customers that are car rental companies car share companies logistic providers so our goal is to stack their fleet with our proprietary tech and enable them to remotely drive their own vehicles and their own fleet so if you are a rental car service yes small big medium or if you were get around or one of those yes get around automatically does like opening and closing of doors i think remotely hey here's the next phase we're going to be able to drive it continue success everybody go to halo car and we'll see you all next time on this week in startups bye bye